No person is actually owning billions in the way a normal person is owning 100$. There is just no way to spend a billion dollars by consuming. There is no diner that you can eat that will cost a million dollars.<p>So, what does it mean for a person to be a billionaire?<p>It means that they control resources. Organizations, human resources, intellectual property, land, minerals.<p>Controlling resources is freaking hard. A random, average person who wins in lotto will most likely lose their wealth as soon as they start trying to do anything ambitious with it because controlling big amounts of money is very difficult.<p>Self-made billionaires are proven to be very, very good or even extremely good at controlling resources. They managed to change 100 000 dollars, into 100 million dollars, into 1 billion dollars. That means that other people decided to give them control over these resources (or may be willing to) in exchange for something that they considered equal value. They made and control something of value and are proven to be good at doing that.<p>So assuming that market value is well aligned with more general societal wealth, I'm happy that billionaires do control resources. Not because it's fair or not fair, but because they are good at that. They are better than officials that we can elect or choose based on some other bureaucratic processes. Are they perfect? Certainly not. Is the market aligned with the interests of society? Generally yes, with big exceptions.<p>There are some other conclusions, for example, children of billionaires are not proven to be extremely good at doing anything by being their children. Therefore, we may have some better ways of controlling billions that their parents controlled.
The article mentions that CEOs are not important to a company, if that was true why would they hire a CEO instead of 300 more full time employees. Obviously there must be some huge value to having a single person direct the company.
“Is anyone willing to defend the idea that any human being is really able to provide society with labor that is 300 times more useful than another's?”<p>Not too hard to come up with examples. A Western Medicin doctor (vs. some homœopathy ditto). An inventor of something useful, etc.<p>It’s also weird to compare a few CEOs with all farmers and ask who we’d miss more. A fair comparison would be a to compare the same amount of people in the two groups and ask who you’d miss more.<p>There are some intriguing issues around inequality. I think there are some obvious problems with how the US and other countries are wired, but this article isn’t intellectually honest enough to provide an interesting argument.
If Elon musk wasn't allowed to be a billionaire would we have Tesla? SpaceX? Would Amazon exist?<p>Companies like Amazon are efficient leaders in their segment. Was it just the first movers advantage? Or could a random parade of CEOs have achieved the same thing?<p>I think a more useful question is, should we allow billionaire's that don't produce anything. Seems like inheritances, manipulating the stock market, and related aren't actually benefiting the world compared to Amazon or Tesla.